The Exodus Chronicles
Pastor Rollan Fisher
God Sees
God Hears
God Acts
God Sees
God sees the suffering of those he loves.
Exodus 2:23-25
During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew.
Even when you find yourself in challenging situations, never forget that God will remember his covenant with you.
You need to read and understand the covenant to have confidence to cry out to God to be faithful to it.
“Because God is the living God, He can hear; because He is a loving God, He will hear; because He is our covenant God, He has bound Himself to hear.”
— Charles H. Spurgeon
God Hears
God hears the prayers of those who cry out to him.
Exodus 3:7-10
Then the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.”
God desires to bring us into abundant life in Christ (John 10:10) based on his covenant.
There are expectations in the covenant of God: faith and obedience.
Romans 1:1-6
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ,
What can block us from the life of God or from God hearing our prayers?
When we pick and choose which of his commands to obey.
Proverbs 15:8
The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord, but the prayer of the upright is acceptable to him.
Psalm 66:18-20
If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. But truly God has listened; he has attended to the voice of my prayer. Blessed be God, because he has not rejected my prayer or removed his steadfast love from me!
“Sin, transgression, and iniquity are different words in the Old Testament. Most of us are familiar with the Greek term hamartia, meaning “sin,” which conveys the idea of falling short of the mark. We are made for the glory of God, but sin causes us to fall short of the mark. Transgression has the very basic idea of crossing the line. God has given us His law, and we cross the line. Iniquity has the sense in Psalm 51, for example, of “twistedness.” There is a twistedness in us as a consequence of this. All of these words are different angles of one and the same reality: our disobedience to God, our againstness, our hatred, our diversion from Him.
They say that the more important something is, the more words you’ll find in that culture for that something. And there is an abundance of vocabulary in the Hebrew Old Testament for sin. But the great thing is, there is also an abundance of vocabulary for the idea of grace. So there’s bad news, but there’s also very good news.”
-Sinclair Ferguson
You must honor the Son, not idols, for God to honor your prayers.
“Those that name the name of Christ, but do not depart from iniquity, as that name binds them to do, name it in vain; their worship is vain.”
-Matthew Henry
God Acts
God acts on behalf of those who would respond to his saving hand in Jesus Christ.
What King David learned:
Psalm 145:15-20
The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season. You open your hand; you satisfy the desire of every living thing. The Lord is righteous in all his ways and kind in all his works. The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth. He fulfills the desire of those who fear him; he also hears their cry and saves them. The Lord preserves all who love him, but all the wicked he will destroy.
God ultimately acted by sending his son Jesus Christ to be the greater Moses to deliver us all from our bondage to sin.
To call on God in truth means that you don’t make up your own form of religion or spirituality, but that you submit to the Lordship of Christ.
When you fear God, it means that you are committed to obeying his commands because you know that he will judge all of your works.
When you turn to God in repentance from self-righteousness and self-sufficiency, you are clothed with the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ.
Because of the cross of Jesus, God meets us in our weakness and failings to preserve us and teach us how to love him.
Second City Church - Pastor Rollan Fisher